Posted on 08/02/2017 8:51:30 AM PDT by Sean_Anthony
Four years after Dunkirk, the Allied armies landed on the beaches at Normandy. They had learned from their Dunkirk. Will Democrats learn from theirs?
The currently-running 2017 movie version of the World War II events surrounding Dunkirk did not address how Allied forces ended up surrounded by the Germans in late May 1940.
Here’s one explanation: Britain and France expected a static war with Germany patterned after World War I, but Germany’s army was mobile and flexible. Two different sets of war rules were at play.
Churchill said that Britain was defended by a “bodyguard of lies”.
That sounds like the Democratic plan to me!
A well written blog post, thank you!
No because the democrats will place their faith in socialism. England prayed for a miracle and the English channel had an unusual period of calm waters which allowed small boats to cross while there was heavy cloud cover grounding the Luftwaffe. Quite a miracle as things turned out.
There is an excellent book by that title: “Bodyguard of Lies.”
Not exactly true. Everyone knew the Maginot Line ended at Belgium. The British/French strategy was to funnel the Germans into the waiting Anglo-French armies with their superior tanks.
That’s right. The French had much better tanks, with heavier armor and better guns, than the Germans. But the Germans had something neither the French or British had-—radios that connected their tank units (the famous radio around the neck. Germans had far better command and control and were able to outmaneuver the larger Allied tanks.
In addition, the Germans had superior air power. The Me109e was far superior to any plane the Allies had. Spitfires were just coming on line and few, if any, were deployed to Europe. Without air superiority, the Stukas had a field day with the slow French tanks.
Once the Allies lost the air war, it was over.
The result: The Belgians were cutoff and defeated. The French retreated South. And the Brits were trapped at the Channel.
I have never quite understood how the Allies ended up losing so badly in France. They were bunched up in northern France waiting for the Germans to come at them from the east like in WW1. Instead, the Germans came through further south and turned north.
So the only difference was that the Germans appeared on their south flank instead of the east. Why couldn’t the Allies just turn 90 degrees and attack that way?
I remember a Southern cavalry General in the Civil War that was chasing some Northerners. Seems that they also picked up some Northerners behind them during the chase. That was certain defeat. However, he divided up his men in two groups and attacked in both directions. And won.
History doesn’t record how half-hearted many of the French were in opposing Hitler, when they feared the alternative was Stalin. They’d watched the communists ravage Spain in the civil war there (1936-1939), killing thousands of priests, hundreds of nuns, and a dozen bishops. The only countries to support the Catholic population were Germany and Italy, and in the end they succeeded. It left a deep impression in many Catholic countries in Europe, and motivated many to openly side with the Axis rather than watch communist revolutions overturn (”fundamentally transform”) their countries. They knew what Stalin had also done in the Ukraine in the 1930s, and by 1940 they also knew what was done in the Baltic states and Poland.
It was no accident that when Americans landed in French North Africa, they were shot down by (neutral) French troops who wanted no part in the war. Some French fought valiantly against the Germans; far more wanted no part of it. They had lost 1.7 million men 25 years before, and were in no mood to do it again.
German tactics, which permitted junior officers much more leeway in dealing with the situation “on the ground”, also served them well. In modern war it was destined to defeat risk-averse, hesitant reactions.
Yes. My co-author & I, in “A Patriot’s History of the Modern World” debated a lot the relative quality of the GI vs Germans and no question for most of the war the Germans were superior due to training.
My dad was in the 7th Army. First landfall overseas for him was North Africa. The fighting had already halted but there was still a captured German army left to process, as well as some Italian units. My dad says the Afrika Korps POWs were the best trained soldiers he saw in the entire war. Their officers had them all get up at the crack of dawn and drill every day. They had good order and discipline in everything they did. The Italians... were Italians.
One of the German POWs spoke very good English. He told the GIs processing him “I feel sorry for you. You have to stay and fight the war. I get to go to America”.
My mom lived on a farm in west Texas. During the war they employed a number of German POWs. Coulda been one rounded up by my dad.
The Japanese were good soldiers, well-trained, dedicated (to the point of fanaticism), and tough but lacking any improvisation skills. The Germans combined that with ingenuity.
Books from the German viewpoint like "Hold the Westwall" by Timm Haasler, and Doug Nash's "Victory Was Beyond Their Grasp" gave me a better idea of exactly what my own Uncle B faced while he was still trudging up that learning curve. He was lucky to survive long enough to become proficient at his task.
Mr. niteowl77
Our replacement policies didn’t work well. Germans were befter able to keep vet units together.
Absolutely. Uncle B was a "replacement" in the 47th Infantry insofar as he was not with the unit when it was in North Africa/Sicily, but he had time in England before D+4 to train with the core of the unit. Once the Fall of 1944 was underway, the replacement policies became a serious problem that wasted many lives. Uncle B was wounded, sent to the rear, and rather than end up in the "repple depple," he busted out of the hospital, hitch-hiked to his unit and lost a stripe for doing so. He knew that he and his buddies kept each other alive, staying alive had already become hard enough, and there was always time for another stripe if he wanted it (which he did not).
Mr. niteowl77
Our casualties in frontline combat infantrymen were so high, trying to keep a unit together through the repple depple process wasn’t all that effective anyway. My dad, a squad leader in the 29th ID, 116th IR, was twice wounded in action. On both occasions, he was evacuated to hospitals and returned both times to his original L Company. The second time he was in hospital for about a month, and when he was returned to his unit (as a newly-promoted Sergeant) there wasn’t one single man remaining in his squad that was known to him.
American commanders complained that too often they were using the same hardened troops over and over again because the average soldier just wasn’t very aggressive/motivated.
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